Yale’s ‘Repeal the First Amendment’ Petition and the Death of Critical Thinking

Earlier this month I came across a “Digital Short” by political satirist Ami Short, which claimed to show Yale University students signing a petition to repeal the First Amendment. It’s apparently part of this ever-spreading panic in America about concepts like “safe spaces” and “microaggressions” and “trigger warnings” that has people on all sides of the political spectrum clutching their pearls in terror at the boogeyman of the coddled American college student. Thankfully I’m not the only person who’s been rather skeptical about how prominent these phenomena actually are.

So, “Yale students sign ‘petition’ to repeal the first amendment.” I watched the video and, as someone who has plenty of experience with both creative editing and sensationalist headlines, was utterly unsurprised to see that it failed to deliver on the promised outrage. It featured about a minute of clips taken from a signature-gathering session that was supposedly an hour long, with no clip lasting more than a few seconds and a strange disconnectedness between Horowitz’s explanation of his petition and people’s responses to it. Like a superhero and their alter ego, the two never seemed to be in the same place at the same time.

After browsing around a few different write-ups of the video and rolling my eyes at how many people had fallen for it, I promptly put it out of my mind because… well, Star Wars happened, and that was distracting. I was reminded of it again this week after reading a bloated, aimless Guardian thinkpiece about how there’s no such thing as a “safe space” when you’re at a Christmas party with your racist parents, and blocking people on Twitter is bad, and kids today just want an echo chamber etc. (if you’re thinking of writing a thinkpiece about how students today are too sheltered, please don’t; we have enough of them already). Out of curiosity, I returned to the story of the spooky scary Yale students who want to take away your free speech, in the hope that someone had given it the debunking it deserved.

Here’s the thing: no one had. Quite a few internet commenters had wearily pointed out how heavily edited the video was, but in news circles it had passed by unchallenged and caused a brief flurry of wailing about how it signified the end of civilization as we know it. It had entered the annals of history (in Internet time, two weeks ago is the annals of history) as truth — an anecdote to be referenced as hard evidence in future discussions of how university students just want to censor everything. In other words, it had achieved exactly what Horowitz wanted it to.

For a bit of fun, let’s do some mathematics. Horowitz claims that he got over 50 signatures in under an hour. This was reported as pure fact by a number of news outlets, with no “allegedly” or “claims” caveat preceding it. He further claims that 55% of people agreed to sign. Using the most generous interpretation of “under an hour,” and assuming that absolutely no one he approached brushed him off with an excuse along the lines of, “Sorry, I’m too busy to talk,” this means that he spoke to 91 people for an average of 39 seconds each. According to Horowitz’s claim, this time frame allowed each person approached to listen to his pitch, ask him any questions they might have had, look over the petition, put their signature down if they so choose, and bid him farewell.

Let’s now take a look at the video. It’s obvious that Horowitz is standing in a low-traffic area. In the wide shot there are usually a couple of people at most walking past, and in a shot that lasts around two or three seconds (none of the clips last any longer than this) he converses with a student with no one else walking past at all. In order to achieve the generous allowance of 39 seconds per person (again, assuming no brush-offs at all), Horowitz would have had to immediately jump from one person to the next with no break. That’s quite a feat in an area where there don’t seem to be a lot of people passing through. Horowitz would have needed to zip around from one person to the next like the Energizer bunny and explain his petition to them very, very quickly, but in the 1 minute and 20 seconds of total footage that we see, he doesn’t appear to be doing either. Of course, perhaps the footage is misleading.

If the actual petition were published, it might shed some more light on Ami Horowitz’s escapades. For example, did people simply have to scribble down an illegible version of their name, or did they also have to put their name in print and leave their home address or phone number? Speaking as someone who has gathered signatures in the past, the actual writing tends to eat into quite a lot of time. Unfortunately we don’t know exactly how much information the Yale students had to provide, or even what the petition itself said, because Horowitz has declined to share it. He has remained similarly mute in response to requests for an unedited version of the video.

So, how do we know that he got 50 signatures in under an hour? Well, because he says so. In a “Digital Short” by a “political satirist.” So, was the “50 signatures in under an hour” claim the truth, or was it satire? Did anyone bother to ask?

Apparently not. Almost every single news outlet that reported on the video accepted it completely uncritically. Very few mentioned the fact that it has been edited in such a way that we never see anyone responding directly to the phrase “repeal the First Amendment,” or that a full exchange is never shown, or even that some of those who encountered Ami Horowitz claim that he made no mention at all of repealing the First Amendment. And aside from a scathing response by Above The Law’s Joe Patrice, no outlets have attempted to challenge Horowitz’s claims. He says he got 50 signatures in under an hour, so it must be true.

Am I saying that Ami Horowitz is lying? Sure, why not. His claim is implausible in the extreme if you look at the practical implications listed above. He hasn’t provided any evidence to back it up, and he has no credentials that would particularly canonize him as Saint Truthteller. The dishonesty displayed in his video editing alone would call for an inquiry by the Church of Truthtelling.

The temptation to read a story while carefully avoiding looking too hard at the details is understandable when that story reinforces your existing prejudices. But as a journalist, looking hard at the details is supposed to be part of the job. And at Mediaite, at Reason, at National Review, at The Daily Mail, at The Daily Beast, at the Washington Examiner, and — of course — at Fox News, that responsibility was conveniently overlooked.